Captivity

If you are feeling trapped in a situation, you instantly want to change something about this situation. This dilemma could probably not be described more accurately than in this anecdote of Jerome K. Jerome. By a doctor he is ordered to stay in bed for a month, to recover form an illness. At first glance, it seems to him as an great opportunity to lay idle the whole day.

It seemed a delightful prospect. „This man evidently understands my complaint,“ said I, and I pictured to myself a glorious time--a four weeks‘ dolce far niente with a dash of illness in it. Not too much illness, but just illness enough--just sufficient to give it the flavor of suffering and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and a dressing-gown. I should lie out in the garden in a hammock and read sentimental novels with a melancholy ending, until the books should fall from my listless hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds floating like white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as they passed by.

Jerome, Jerome K.: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889

But soon enough he realises that he was mistaken:

But „drinking the waters“ was only a small portion of the torture I experienced during that memorable month--a month which was, without exception, the most miserable I have ever spent.

Jerome, Jerome K.: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889

As soon as we are find ourselves confined in a situation, our mind revolts by setting us out to boredom.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.